Everyone else's future employers: "Please, can we just find some workers
who can do basic arithmetic in their heads?"

Kim
said...

Heres' the thing. I
appreciate art because I understand what goes into it. I can barely draw a
stick figure that looks like a stick figure, so when I look at a work of art I
see the beauty in it and recognize the skill and imagination that it took to
create such a piece. It's the same thing when I see a skilled dancer, musician,
or football player. Part of appreciating what they do so well is recognizing
how much work it took to make them the works of art they are.

The thing is - none of them - the artist, the dancer, the musician, the
football player - not a single one of them became what they are just by
observing and appreciating art, dancing, music, or football. They had to learn
about it first. They had to learn how to hold a paintbrush, how to stand on
their toes, how to play a note, and how to catch a ball. Lots of other people
tried, just like them, but didn't have the gift they do. That's what makes
their gift so valuable - the fact that not many of us can do what they do.

The same thing applies to math. You have to learn how to add, subtract,
multiply, and divide to understand and be in awe of things like pi.

And...just like artists, musicians, dancers, and football players are freaks of
nature, so too are the gifted mathematicians who imagine that the swirling
hexagon / decagon exercise would do anything other than give most of us a
headache.

Anonymous
said...

The difference is that
incredible artists, musicians, dancers, and football players don't
imagine everybody else could easily do what they do if they just followed their
simple educational program.

About Me

Katharine Beals, PhD, is the author of "Raising a Left-Brain Child in a Right-Brain World: Strategies for Helping Bright, Quirky, Socially Awkward Children to Thrive at Home and at School" (Shambhala/Trumpeter)
Katharine is an educator and the mother of three left-brain children. She has taught math, computer science, social studies, expository writing, linguistics, and English as a second language to students of all ages, both in the U.S. and overseas. She is also the architect of the GrammarTrainer, a linguistic software program for language impaired children.
She is currently a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education and an adjunct professor at the Drexel University School of Education.

Left-brain, right-brain, and brain hemispheres

This site uses left-brain and right-brainnot as physiological terms for the actual left and right hemispheres of the brain, but as they are employed in the everyday vernacular. They appear here in the same spirit in which people use type A and type B (themselves the relics of a debunked theory about blood type and character type): an informal shorthand for certain bundles of personality traits.